Ray Atlee is a professor of law at the University of Virginia. Hes forty-three, newly single, and still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. He has a younger brother, Forrest, who redefines the notion of a familys black sheep.

And he has a father, a very sick old man who lives alone in the ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi. He is known to all as Judge Atlee, a beloved and powerful official who has towered over local law and politics for forty years. No longer on the bench, the Judge has withdrawn to the Atlee mansion and become a recluse.

With the end in sight, Judge Atlee issues a summons for both sons to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of his estate. It is typed by the Judge himself, on his handsome old stationery, and gives the date and time for Ray and Forrest to appear in his study.

Ray reluctantly heads south, to his hometown, to the place where he grew up, which he prefers now to avoid. But the family meeting does not take place. The Judge dies too soon, and in doing so leaves behind a shocking secret known only to Ray.

A collection of photographs capturing the mysterious
interiors of juke joints in the Mississippi Delta.

“I saw that photograph of the men standing
around the pool table, and read that phrase, 2-kool 2-be 4-gotten,
and the inspiration was obvious. Every time I sing that song I credit Birney
Imes. Birneys work is, in photography, what a good blues song is to me—gritty,
edgy in all its parallels.” —Lucinda Williams

“Sweet lingering drifts through
these pictures like heat.” —Richard Ford

These photographs by Birney Imes have
the jagged edge of genuine blues music. They were taken in the Mississippi Delta
during the 1980s, featured in exhibitions, and collected in Juke Joint,
first published in 1990. After being unavailable for five years, this riveting
book is in print again. As Lucinda Williams sang, it's “too cool to be
forgotten.”

Imes focused his camera on nearly empty
rooms, yet these bluesy, almost peopleless photographs capture black cafes,
roadhouses, and taverns as a fascinating folk art that resounds with energy
and pulses with the joys and griefs of the clientele.

The names of these juke joints are
almost as evocative as Imess photographs—the Pink Pony in Darling,
Mississippi, the Peoples Choice Café in Leland, Monkeys Place
in Merigold, the Evening Star Lounge in Shaw, the Playboy Club in Louise, Juicys
Place in Marcella, the Social Inn in Gunnison, and A. D.s Place in Glendora.

To the volume Richard Ford, the acclaimed
author of The Sportswriter, Rock Springs, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Independence Day, has contributed a long, perceptive essay that probes
Imess photographs for their aesthetic values and for what they reveal
beyond their surface.

Birney Imes is the photographer and
author of Whispering Pines (University Press of Mississippi). His photographs
have been exhibited in solo shows in the United States and in Europe. His work
is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
Richard Ford, the author of many books of fiction, has been the recipient of
both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.